Elizabeth Bentley shares life experiences.

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A Few New Pots

I’ve been working on a couple of ideas and wanted to see how they’d work in various clay bodies and glazes.

This first set is the Sea Life series. (You can click on the photos to see a larger version.)

It began with the pot on the left that I created in class at Brookhaven College. I was going for tubular growth/sea life and wanted it to be pristine. So it was made of a cone 10 white clay (Trinity Ceramics T-Mix10) and I was planning on using a white glaze on it. Well, I couldn’t find the white glaze; so, I dipped it in “Snow”. Now, you’d think that a glaze called “Snow” would be white, wouldn’t you?? It’s more gray than white but, actually, I like it better, especially the white tips on each tube.

Next, I built Sea Life: Gulf using a cone 6 red stoneware. Then, it was glazed with Lapis Satin, Gun Metal Green and Copper Blue (Coyote glazes). The glazes ran together; I like the result.

Finally, there’s Sea Life: South Pacific. The clay is a black (actually dark brown) cone 6. And, before the bisque firing, I coated the tips of the tubes with a slip/silicon carbide mixture. You can’t really tell it’s on the pot until you add glazes and refire it. Glazes are Matt Bronze Green all over, then Copper Blue (Coyote) sprayed on and Sea Salt (Mayco) dabbed on. Love it! Gotta try more of that.

Sea Life: Arctic

Sea Life: Gulf

Sea Life: South Pacific

Next, I wanted to try new shapes; so, I created tarpaper templates and these pots are the result of that experiment.

The main body of the pots are glazes with Coyote’s oil spot glazes. The one on the left is Brick/Marshmallow; the one on the right is Licorice/Marshmallow. The top/bottom accent sections are glazed with Coyote’s White Crawl. Interesting but need to play with these concepts and glazes a bit more.